The majority of our discussion this time revolves around the three “C’s”: how competence leads to confidence, which leads to consistency. That’s the formula we believe in, but the particulars of how it works are more important than just keeping it as a mantra, especially in relation to our recent topics of right brain/left brain activity. In addition to that, we talk a bit about our most recent coaching technology, corrective vision surgery and what’s much more important than the level of perceived “difficulty” in targets.
Gil: Tonight I want to do just a really quick synopsis of what we talked about last week because it bleeds into what I want to talk about tonight, which is right brain and left brain activity. I’ve been writing on this all day long and there have been several revelations to me today. I know it’s going to help impact quite few of the people that are listening to the coaching hours now on the Knowledge Vault. The thing is growing and it’s getting better and bigger.
And we’re doing articles now for the next half a year in Sporting Clays magazine, and each one of those articles is going to have a sequential photograph of one of the animations in it, that would be three different stills to show you Step 1, Step 2, Step 3; but it’s also going to have a QR code so you can shoot that with your Smartphone, and it’ll take you into the Knowledge Vault so you can actually watch the animation with a voiceover while you’re reading the article. So it’s going to be a revolutionary thing.
Gil: I’ve got to tell you I listened to the coaching hour today from last month, and there was a lot of meat in there, and it echos things that Vicki and I are talking about on a daily basis. And the gist of it to me was the more clear you can be to your brain what it is you’re asking it to do from a visual feeling standpoint, the quicker it will give it to you.
And I told Vicki today I had a lesson with Bill Pemberton who is a hunter from Nacogdoches. He shoots a 20 gauge side by side, and when I first started working with him, he’d be lucky to hit eight or ten out of a box, and today he shot 150 rounds and maybe missed no more than eight. And the dramatic turnaround, other than doing it more than once every three months, was that he began to realize that if he mounted the gun way in front of the bird and let the bird come to him, if the lead took care of itself, he almost always hit bird, and that was a big turnover for him, and I know that Vicki and I have talked about this quite a bit.
When the bird comes to the lead as you’re stabilizing the picture, adjusting the gun speed, it is a magical magical thing. We see this happen on a weekly basis when we go into these clubs where we teach and we put the monitor up and we get these people to be early in the break point and let the bird come to them. It is an absolutely magical thing, and I am convinced now more than ever, not only in observation of others shooting but our shooting as well not only on clay targets but on game birds, that there’s something magical about this. I don’t know whether it’s the way the brain likes to get the information. I’ve said it a lot of different ways.
I was in my zone a month ago, and I said: Imagine what your car would be doing if you merged in front of the car like your gun barrel merges in front of a target. And, of course, when people finally got that, they began laughing, but what we’re teaching you to do is to actually merge that gun in front of that target, but instead of coming from too close to the target and pushing out, it’s more letting the target come to you, and you use that merging circuit that you’ve developed your whole life of merging into the freeway ahead of the spot and when you start thinking about the things you do in your life, seldom in your life do you let the action get ahead of you and then you have to catch up to it. Everything you do you’re cutting things off. You’re always cutting things off, and you always want to be ahead of the action because if you’re ahead of the action, you’ve got plenty of time to react to anything that might change. If you’re behind the action, you’re in panic mode, which is left brain, which is not good.
So I can’t say too much about how important it is for you to be really clear to you brain what it is you’re asking it to do, and this is why the animations have so much impact on new shooters and people that have never been with us before, that they finally understand what it’s supposed to look like.
I was talking to Randy Lawrence at the Sporting Clays magazine today, and he just got into the Knowledge Vault. They’re going to do a story on it in the November issue, and he was looking at it and he was speechless, and I said: Are you still there?
And he said: Yeah, but you guys have changed the way things are going to be done.
I said: Yes, sir, we have. The game has changed, and the way it’s going to be done has changed.
And he said: You’re telling me that I’m going to be able to take my iPhone and shoot a QR code in the October issue and I’ll be able to see the animation that you have stills on in the article in motion, plus a voiceover made specifically for that article?
And I said: Yes, sir, and not only will you be able to see that, if you want one of our animations to be in your articles to illustrate a point, all you have to do is tell me which animation you want and what you want it to say and I’ll do a voiceover for you and you can put it in your article and you can put a QR code and you can do the same thing.
He said: You have changed the way people are going to do articles in magazines, haven’t you?
And I said: Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve changed the way we’re going to do them. We’ll see what the rest of the world does.
But, anyway, it’s just important to me to emphasize to everybody out there, because now it’s not just the 40 or 50 that are on the coaching hour. It’s everybody on the Knowledge Vault, and we’re getting a lot of comments from people that are on the Knowledge Vault that are listening to the coaching hour segments, and they’re coming to us saying, I never realized how valuable it was. I never realized how much information is on it. And so we’re not only talking to you guys; but we’re talking to everybody out there on the Knowledge Vault.
It’s important that you be very clear to your brain what it is you’re asking it to do prior to closing the gun and going into your routine and taking the shot. If your preload is the same as your reality, then the brain begins that neuro suppression, and it’s the neuro suppression that gives you the ability to focus at a higher level. Now, that’s a little bit of the review.
Gil: Clyde, you had mentioned that you were going to shoot a couple of more tournaments, and you’d shot a couple and you were mid 70s, mid to high 70s. You’re seeing the target well as a result of your operation, right?
Clyde: Correct.
Gil: But where is the disconnect? Do you not have time to practice? Is there a timing deficiency? What do you think the disconnect is? Because you’re normally shooting mid 80s to low 90s, right?
Clyde: Yeah. The disconnect is living in Kingwood up here, there’s just no place to go practice. I mean, it’s difficult with a drive all the way out to American or someplace. You can do it; but the practice is actually taking place during the tournaments now. That’s one of part of it; but another part of it is, if you have a 12 station type tournament, I miss one per station. I’m down in the 80s already.
Gil: Right.
Clyde: You know, I may miss the first bird and then run the rest of it, and I haven’t figured out just part of it. And then there’s some of the presentations, two or three of them, that’s giving me some problems. I’m just going to have to go find someplace and work on them.
Gil: Do you attribute that to your increased vision?
Clyde:
No. I attribute it to a whole
lack of practice.
Gil: Okay. I just want to make sure.
Clyde: I’ll make a statement that I find is probably complimentary to your teaching style, there’s not much of a learning curve. You know the moves. You know the routine. You pick all of that up. It’s just the little things that are real rusty. I mean to lay off, say, six, seven months and go out and shoot from the mid 70s. I think 86 won it.
Gil: Oh, that’s huge.
Clyde: When you get beat by two to three birds and you know the two or three birds that you dropped. If I shoot a 75, 76, I know exactly. I should have been in the 82 to 84 range, and I’m not going to say it’s a lack of focus because everything will be going good, and it’s usually more than likely the first bird. I can make the adjustment a lot just because of what you talk about. You see exactly where to go. You go to the break point. If it didn’t break, just move at it and move it a little bit more. Then you’re there. But if it’s just one bird per station, and especially in this area down here, you’re not going to do well.
Gil: But understand, for not being able to practice and laying off like you said for six or seven months, to be able to go out and shoot that kind of score is a testimony to our system and your working so hard on your basic fundamental moves. Like you knew when you first came to us years ago, you said: I know how to compete as a professional fisherman. I can do this. I want you to show me what the fundamentals are, and once you show me what the fundamentals are, I will get the fundamentals down.
And you did exactly that. You worked relentlessly on your fundamentals. That’ something, if we can get everybody to do like you did, our jobs would be so much easier, and their scores would be so much higher. You know that from your fishing. The difference in a bite and a no bite could be six inches of where the lure lands, and you have to be spot on with what you do in your fishing, and it’s the same thing. It’s the same. It goes back to the same fundamentals in shooting as it does in archery and pole vaulting and chess, anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether you’re pulling weeds, there’s certain fundamentals that you have to come down with, and they have to be good enough and deep enough into your subconscious where they happen without you thinking about them, and you’ve done that. So tell me about how you’re seeing now.
Clyde: I can say I’m probably seeing like I saw when we first started this thing five, seven years ago. The vision is extremely well. There’s no excuse on that part of it.
Gil: Okay.
Clyde: Part of it is that in my shooting a lot of the competitive tournaments for, say, in six or eight months the presentations have changed somewhat, which I am not quite familiar with. An example is I shot one the other day where they threw it and it bounced it off the water. You know, those kind of things you just understand how it works; but you get fascinated by watching where it’s going to hit instead of where you’re going to shoot.
Gil: I remember two shots like that. We were up in Central Texas one time at Mike Mize’s place at the State Shoot, and they were running a rabbit along the top of a berm that was about three feet higher than your head. So you could see the rabbit, and about the time you wanted to shoot that rabbit the rabbit went down into a ditch and disappeared, and then about eight feet later it popped up out of that ditch, and people were missing that thing right and left. They swore they hit it; but after they pulled the trigger and the dust cleared, the rabbit came out of the ditch on the other side.
And then I remember one where they were bouncing one off of one of those small jogging trampolines. You’d see it going in and then all of a sudden it went from left to right, low to the ground straight in, to a straight up teal shot, and it just was one of those things that threw you.
Brian B: Well, Gil, over here in Louisiana we’ve taken a battue and threw it from a berm into the water. You can’t see it, and all of a sudden it looks like it comes clean out of the middle of the pond.
Gil: Really.
Brian B: And it goes sky high and it’s something that’s fascinating to see. It shocks everybody because it looks like it’s coming out of the water.
Gil: Really?
Brian Brewton: Yeah.
Gil: Shoot me a video of that. I’ve got to see it.
Brian Brewton: Oh, yeah.
Gil: I got to see it. Well, I will tell you this, Clyde, and you’re right about talking about the system. The system, like you say, you know what you’re supposed to do, and it’s not that difficult of a system. You’ve just got to give yourself some time. Was there an adjustment time for your ability to focus on moving objects after your surgery?
Clyde: No. It was immediate. I mean, from my standpoint, when I walked outside, the colors were a lot more vivid, and the clarity was instantaneous. And I say that; but you will see more things move, and your eyes will catch more things. You know, it’s like you’re watching a target come across and a bird flies. You can see that bird every time.
Gil: That’s the reason for the question. Is the movement more vivid? Are your eyes tending to go to a sudden movement in your periphery more quickly?
Clyde: They go to a certain movement more quickly. Your eyes are like younger eyes. I mean, you just see a lot more because generally what happens is it’s a very slow process, and you don’t realize exactly what vision that you’ve lost, and all of a sudden it’s all back; but I wouldn’t contribute any of that to my lack of scoring.
Gil: No, but there are a lot of people out there that are contemplating doing what you did. Okay? And anytime I can talk to somebody that I know and respect and think of as a very close friend about things like this, our conversation might make somebody else a little less reluctant to go and have something like that done. I like to talk to people that go through things like that to see the little nuances that they begin to discover after the surgery. I mean, to me to see like I saw 25 years ago, it would be incredible. I mean, the things that I could do. I can remember to this day arguing with Bob Brister about, Why can’t you see that target, Bob? It’s right there. All you have to do is put your eyes back over here, and he said: Gil, one day, one day you’re going to realize when you get into your 60s that what you’re telling me you can’t see anymore. All right. I want everybody to hear me. Bob, roll over in your grave. You were right because my 64 year old eyes don’t see like my 34 year old eyes saw when I first started shooting sporting clays.
Clyde: Well, one of the things you’re saying, Gil, there’s probably 16 or 20 people that I know that’s been through this since I have, and I’ll say a hundred percent of them all tell me the same thing. They wished they had done it sooner.
Gil: Yeah.
Clyde: Okay. Now, the other thing that didn’t help is, you see better, but your movements are slower now than they were when you were 35. So you’ll see it quicker; but you also have to remember you don’t move quite as fast as you used to.
Gil: Are you talking about your physical movement with your hands; or are you talking about the movement with your eyes?
Clyde: Your physical movement mainly with your hands.
Gil: Really?
Clyde: Yeah, that’s right. On a quick window shot or something like that, you’ll see that bird but you can’t move as fast as you used to. Also, because I play a little tennis, I’m about two steps off of where I used to be playing tennis. I just can’t get there quite as fast. Now, it’s just the muscles and all that. I think it will come back, and it’s a lack of practice and all; but I’ll see it; but I won’t move on it near as fast as I probably should. It’s probably a disconnect between the eyes and the frame.
Brian B: Gil, Can I add something to that?
Gil: Go for it. You’ve had the surgery, too, right, Brian?
Brian B: Right. Yeah.
Gil: What did you have done?
Brian B: Well,
I had cataracts and I had my lens replaced, and I concur with everything he’s saying; but I
was listening to him about the quickness, I noticed
that I was
getting slower. Everybody is talking with you. You can’t do this and you can’t
do that. So I said,
Well, I can’t
keep on doing this. So I started practicing on stuff that and maybe I
shoot real fast, quicker than I ever had to shoot before, and then I started
shooting my international skeet where
you’re demanded on your break points. If you’re not
there, you’re going
to miss, and
it has improved my game, and I got to where I am shooting
entirely a lot faster than I used to; but you just have to make up
your mind that you’re going to go after it. Because
you can sit there and just say I can’t
do it, and I know there will a point that maybe
physically where I can’t do it; but right now
I’m physically in good shape,
and I’ve gotten
to where I can do it.
Gil: And how long did it take you to train into that, Brian? Because I think really what we’re talking about here is Clyde is telling us where he is in his training and reaction to his new vision.
Brian B: It took me at least three weeks practicing.
Gil: But you practiced every day, right?
Brian B: Right now, and I’m getting ready for some tournaments this weekend, yeah. I don’t shoot a lot. I shoot about 50 birds a day or something like that; but I have specific targets that I really work on to get down and get real smooth, and when you get to the point of where I’m not thinking about what I’m doing and just pull that trigger.
Gil: So for you to get to the speed that you’re at, it took you three or four weeks of practice, 50 birds a day anyway, to get your timing to change so that you could get your movements to catch up with your eyes?
Brian B: Right.
Gil: Which is exactly what Clyde is saying: there ain’t no place for him to practice up there. And it’s going to take him a little while longer, and the delay that Clyde is feeling, as you described it, in tennis he’s two or three steps behind where his vision is. It’s the same thing in shooting.
Clyde, from what Brian says, it’s something you can get back; but it’s going to take some dedicated practice time. And I’m not sure where you are up there right now that you’re going to be able to put that in to get it back as quick as he did; but it eventually could come back.
Clyde: Yeah. The other thing that I noticed in shooting sporting clays is one thing; but going to five stand, I’ll do better shooting five stand than I will on the clays course because you just don’t really have the time to sit there. You’ve got to make your plan and shoot it using five stand.
The other issue that I have and it’s my own doing is that I pretty well lost all of the people that I used to shoot with. Well, actually, three tour- naments, I guess, and I’ve shot by myself, and that makes a difference probably on it for me anywhere from three to five birds. Sometimes I’ll just totally misread what I should do, and if I watch somebody shoot it, then I think, yeah, that’s probably what I should have done. And if you just go out and shoot every station cold, more or less, and look at your show pair and then shoot it, I don’t shoot quite as well as I do if I am able to see, you know, a squad or two in front of them.
Gil: Jeff, what do you think about that? Are you still there?
Jeff: Funny you should ask. I was just thinking, I kind of feel the opposite, and I think it must be, you need to read each shooter and how you relate to everybody you shoot with because there are certain groups of guys that I shoot with, and I will follow the pack. Rather than look at the pair and think it through myself, I’ll just do what the guy in front of me did, and that’s a trap for me. Sometimes that’s not my style. That’s not the way I know how to break targets. And so typically I’ll miss a target or two targets in the first pair and say, Oh, well, wait a minute. I didn’t even look at this really. I just kind of shot it the way everybody else did.
And so for me I sometimes shoot my best scores when I’m on a squad of people that I don’t know. I do still like to look and see the targets, and not be the first shooter at every station; but sometimes when I shoot with certain groups of guys that I know, I’ll fall into certain traps.
Gil: And, Clyde, I think what you were saying is you shot the tournament by yourself. So you didn’t have the benefit of watching other people shoot the pairs while you were making your plan, right?
Clyde: Yeah, that’s correct. And I agree with what Jeff said, and I like to shoot my old plan, and it doesn’t bother me; but I got caught a couple of times. There was a slow bird come out first and on a true pair and a fast bird come out second. When you want to shoot that slow bird first and that fast bird has already passed that slow bird up, you don’t figure that out until after I watched another person shoot. He shot it. You know, they waited for a second and shot the second bird first, and then that slow bird was right where you wanted it. It’s just little things like that, and I just haven’t been watching the number of targets I’m used to watching every year.
Jeff: Yeah. I would just say that, for me, I’m 50/50. There are days when everything is working where I’m actually more comfortable by myself, seeing a show pair and shooting a station by myself; but, like you said, if I haven’t shot a lot or if I’m not in my groove, then you don’t see enough targets to know that there’s a trick or that there’s something visually wrong with what you see. Because target setters like to do things and mess up what you see, and there have been a couple of times where I’ve been in tournaments where I said: You know what? If I shot this pair first, I would have done it a certain way; but the fact that I had three people in front of me to watch led me to see them all make mistakes and understand the mistakes that they made, and then I was able to change my plan to something that worked. So for me the more I’ve shot the less I need to see a lot of targets shot in front of me I guess, is what it boils down to.
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